swimrun coach

Welcome to episode forty of the Low Tide Boyz - A Swimrun Podcast!

This week we have coaches Lauren and Matt Hurley from Black Sheep Endurance Project on the show. Besides being super accomplished athletes in their own right, they are also leading the way in training athletes for multisport and Swimrun. Get your notepads ready because this show is packed with great info. More on the interview later in the show.  

Training Update

Air quality continues to be an issue in Northern California but we are getting out when we can.  With Ödyssey Swimrun Austin just over a month away, we are starting to dial in our gear and plan a couple of long Swimrun practices—weather permitting—and we should be ready for the endurance hootenanny. 

Shout Outs

This week we’re shouting out the country of Taiwan. They clawed their way into the top ten of our most downloads list and we are stoked to see our friends in Asia checking out the show. Fun fact: 65% of all wetsuits are made in Taiwan.

Feats of Endurance Weekly Award

Our award this week goes out Lana C. She’s been holding it down in the Strava Club for all of Australia and has been putting in consistent work all Spring(?) long. Keep it up!

This Week in Swimrun

We have a short report this week.

Keen As Mustard Events in the U.K. had another race this past weekend. The Nene Park Peterborough Swimrun had three distance options with a mix of solo and team categories for the 21km long course race. It looked a bit chilly out there so perhaps the smiling faces were frozen in place but at least folks were smiling.

Over in eastern France, Swimrun Aix-les-Bains looked like a cool urban Swimrun going around Lac du Bourget. In case you’re wondering what’s going on in Aix-les-Bains, it is known as a thermal spa town and swimming, sailing, golf, and now Swimrun are the popular sports. Landmarks include the Roman ruin, Temple of Diana, in the town hall, and the belle epoque Château de la Roche du Roi. 

We’re sure that we may have missed some events. Send us an email at lowtideboyz@gmail.com and tip us off if there’s a race that you are doing and we’ll do our best to include it.

LTBz Updates

Ödyssey Swimrun Austin is just a month away! Join us in Texas and use the code LOWTIDEBOYZ and save 25% on your entry. The fun will be had by all! 

Our friends at Precision Hydration have turned on our discount code again so make sure that you use the code LOWTIDEBOYZ to save 15% off your order. Have questions about PH? You can literally email them and a live human being will talk you through which products will work best for you! Be sure to check out our episode featuring Precision Hydration Co-Founder Andy Blow. 

Finally, head over to our website to pick up some cool Löw Tide Böyz gear and show your Low Tide Pride at your local Costco and other locations where shirts are required. 

Interview

Now for this week’s interview with Lauren and Matt from The Black Sheep Endurance Project! 

Lauren Hurley (formerly Goss) was a pro triathlete before becoming a coach and Matt Hurley was a coach with Purple Patch Fitness before they started Black Sheep Endurance Project together in 2019. They met at 2018 Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon and legend has it that Matt fell instantly in love with Lauren.

We had a great conversation where we chatted about how they developed their coaching philosophy, how Black Sheep instantly took off when they launched it in 2019, how they intentionally keep the number of athletes that they coach low so that they can focus on one-on-one coaching and their plans for the future.

We couldn’t help but hit them up for free coaching advice since we had them on the show and they did not disappoint. We discussed how to work on specificity in the pool and how to apply that in open water. We got some great tips for doing big swim sets in a fatigued state. We got their advice on swim paddle size. And so much more! We definitely got a lot out of this interview and think that our listeners will as well.

Black Sheep Endurance Project doesn’t really have a website so the best way to get a hold of them is through DM’s on Instagram.

That’s it for this week’s show. If you are enjoying the Löw Tide Böyz, please be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcast. You can also follow our meme page on Instagram, and on Twitter. Email us at lowtideboyz@gmail.com with any feedback, suggestions and/or meme suggestions. Finally, you can also support us on Patreon…if you feel so inclined. 

Welcome to episode three of the Low Tide Boyz, a swimrun podcast!

On this week’s show we chat about ramping up our training for Catalina and our swim build workout plan that was written by this show’s special guest, Michael Olzinski. More about him later.

We started swimming at a great outdoor Olympic-sized pool that is a huge upgrade from our current crappy 25 yard pool at our crappy gym. Long course swimming has been a great addition to our training given that swimrun is all about swimming long. We’ve started dialing up the swim volume and have been putting in some diabolical sets, curtesy of today’s guest!

We’ve gotten some great feedback about our Swimrun 101 episode so thank you for that. It was also brought to our attention that we didn’t talk about socks and what to wear under a wetsuit. For both of these it comes down to personal preference and we recommend testing whatever you’re going to use before the race. 

We are lucky to have Michael Olzinski on the show this week. He’s a multisport coach with Purple Patch Fitness. He’s a stout athlete in his own right, has a ton of coaching certifications and he’s joining us to chat about swimrun training. Mike first heard about swimrun when some of Purple Patch’s international athletes started asking for training plans to their races.

We chatted with Mike about how to best train for swimrun, focusing on the Otillo Catalina course…since that’s what we have coming up. Acknowledging that training for these events are really an experiment in training and while there are some analogies to events like super league triathlon, where there are multiple short sets of swimming, biking and running. The overarching idea though is that swimrun athletes have to be just that, athletes. As much as swimrun is a swimming and running sport, there’s a lot of room for strength training to handle the impact on your legs and shoulders from all the transitions. This is especially true for newer athletes to the sport. Mike also recommends combining running and swimming often and mix it up to develop the adaptation for transitioning back and forth.

Courses like Otillo’s Catalina World Series race be aerobic event but it will have a lot of spikes and drops in effort levels and, as such, training should have a lot of fartleks thrown in to simulate the spikes in effort that athletes will experience during a race. For swim workouts, Mike is a big fan of doing deck ups at the pool. These are great for getting the body adapted to transitioning from swimming to running. Mike also recommends that during swimming sets, that it’s not necessary to do all your swims with paddles and buoy. Use paddles and buoy mostly for key sets in the water. Adding an ankle strap is also great. Mike recommends trying some fartlek swimming in open water and using swim strokes to count off the sets, such as 30 hard and 30 recovery, then 20 hard and 30 recovery and so forth. Finally, Mike recommends doing a lot of strength and core work to help with maintaining proper posture during long endurance efforts in the water and on land. Mike thinks that everyone should be doing deadlifts. Full stop!

You can find Mike on Instagram, on the Purple Patch platform and at the Nth Degree Athletic Club.

That’s it for this week’s show. If you are enjoying the Low Tide Boyz, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player. We are on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast. You can also follow along on Instagram and Twitter. You can also support us on Patreon, if you are so inclined. If you want to drop us a line, email us at lowtideboyz@gmail.com.